A Voiced Labiodental Fricative [V] in El Paso Spanish

Abstract

A Voiced Labiodental Fricative [V] in El The present study analyzes the voiced labiodental fricative [v] as a variant of the Spanish phoneme /b/ in El Paso Spanish under the scope of language contact. The data used was elicited from thirty one participants employing a task where the influence of the orthographic representation of the graphemes and was absent. Results are compared to previous studies where the influence of orthographic representation was present. This research analyzes the following three factors: 1) the linguistic factors of stress, position in word, and previous and following segments. 2) The social factors gender and participants' group. 3) The acoustic parameters of duration and relative intensity. The data is acoustically and statistically analyzed to provide a detailed description of the variant of interest and to test the influence of English over Spanish. Results show that speakers who were exposed to English at an early age realized higher rates of labiodentals [v] compared to those speakers who were late exposed to English. However, all participants realized the voiced labiodental fricative [v] as a variation of the Spanish phoneme /b/. In addition, results of the acoustic analysis demonstrated that duration are relative intensity are statistically correlated with the perception of the voiced labiodental fricative [v]. Finally, the linguistic factors of stress, position in word, and previous segment and the social factor of group were also statistically significant in the realization of the voiced labiodental fricative [v] in El Paso Spanish^